“Pretty sure you ain’t never served,” Jay said, “so what would you know about bunkers?”
As my dad worked to focus his eyes on Jay, a deep and burning humiliation pulsed through my guts. “Son,” he said to Jay, “I never liked you. I don’t know you, but I don’t like you.”
“Dad,” I said, my insides roiling, “please get out of here.”
“You lied to me,” he said. “There’s no patio on that piece of crap house. The girl told me you all disappear back here every day, though.”
Stella had seen my father this way: the injustice of it all burned at my eyes.
“This is my property.” Jay clenched and unclenched his fists, which hung down at the level of his hips. “And I’m telling you to get off it. Now.”
My dad ignored him. “I had a feeling you were lying to me, Benny. So I wanted to come out here for myself. See the ‘patio’ you’ve been building. Hoping to prove myself wrong. But nope. You lied. Just like you do about everything.”
“It’s not any big deal,” I said, acutely aware of my friends watching me and judging me and storing up digs to bug me with later.
“I just knew you were doing bad things out here,” my dad said. “Who could guess what you have planned? Teenaged kids are crazy. Look at that one.” He pointed to Jay. “A thug if I ever saw one.”
“What the fuck?” Jay broke from the line of our crew and rushed at my father. “What did you call me? On my own property? I could shoot you with the law on my side.” Jay didn’t slow his momentum when he reached my father, but instead held out his arms and pushed so that my father stumbled back, and as Jay advanced and pushed again, a clamoring panic rose in my chest. At first, I couldn’t understand why I was so freaked, but then I realized that my father was tottering straight for our bear trap, that mound of debris that had stopped stinking weeks ago, when some sneaky animal must have gobbled up the rotten hamburger without getting its foot caught.
My dad tripped, his balance already compromised by drink, and fell into the middle of the traps.
“Oh, shit!” I said, rushing towards him, ready to pull off my t-shirt to wrap around the stump of his ankle or wrist.
But he was brushing the leaves off of a trap, trying to see what had cut his shin. The trap hadn’t clamped closed, the way it was supposed to. Maybe it had rusted open after all this time, or maybe it had been too old to work in the first place.
“Dad, get out of there,” I said and reached out my hand to help him up.
Jay was breathing heavily. A couple of swallows appeared overhead in a dance with each other; they twirled above Jay. “He never comes here again,” he said.
My dad looked startled as I pulled him to his feet. Maybe he had sobered some, getting humiliated like that. I worried that he would try to fight Jay or say something else to piss him off, but instead he walked with me through the woods. His shin was bleeding, but not too much. The dirt was alive beneath our feet, alive and decaying, and we both stepped carefully over the uneven surface. He kept quiet, which was worse than him trying to explain it all away, because a new understanding hung heavy between us, this idea that he was weaker than Jay, that Jay came before him in my life.
Once my dad and I got in sight of Jay’s house, I turned back. “See you later,” I said. He worked his jaw, probably trying to figure out how he could make this my fault.
Finally he came out with, “Stop killing me with the lying.”
“You never gave me my allowance,” I said. “Not all summer. So I don’t see what it is to you.”
My dad opened his mouth, but closed it again without speaking. He fumbled with his wallet and handed me a ten dollar bill that smelled of dog food. Alone, I walked slowly along the path, and I wondered if Jay had realized the direction in which he’d pushed my dad, if he’d done it on purpose, trying to finally trap something.
Soon after the incident with my dad, Toshi and I headed home. That morning, my bike tire had been flat, so we’d walked. Up in the sky, you could see both the sun and the moon through the tree branches. A few wisps of clouds were catching the sun’s light on their pale underbellies, which reminded me of fishing for frogs with my dad, big fat bullfrogs he’d cook up later and call a delicacy. We hadn’t fished in years.
“I don’t want to go to school tomorrow,” Toshi said. “School sucks.”
I walked along the edge of the road, careful not to get too close to the ditch.
“All those tests”—Toshi’s voice got whinier and whinier—“and the cardboard-tasting cafeteria food, and the rotten bathrooms.”
“Just shut up about it.”
“You don’t have to yell.”
The sun was quickly disappearing, and the moon was growing brighter. “At least school will give us something else to do.”
“Yeah,” Toshi said, “I guess you want to get out of the house.”
“I guess you want to shut the fuck up.” I took a breath. “I just mean that my dad isn’t always like that.”
Up in the sky, a little crop duster sputtered and released a cloud of bug juice. The molecules, faintly purple, floated softly to earth.
“It’s not really Jay’s fault,” Toshi said. “Probably, lately, he’s been thinking about his brother. It happened in the summer. I mean, that would make me sad all the time, but Jay…”
“What?”
“He’s probably been thinking about it because of that thing—you know—when we walked into his house. With his family in the living room.”
“No—his brother?”
By then it was mostly dark, but I could sense Toshi staring at me. “He never told you? Sorry; forget I ever said anything. I’m getting one of my headaches; it makes me stupid…”
I wanted to ask Toshi a hundred questions, but I didn’t want to admit that I had no idea what he was talking about. “Jay tells me everything,” I said. “We’re best friends.”
We walked the rest of the way home in silence until Toshi handed over my old cast and asked if I wanted it back. “I’m going to stop wearing it,” he said. “Tell my dad that it was all healed up so Jay’s parents took me to get it cut off. I’ll act like it’s a miracle my arm is still straight.”
“I don’t want it,” I said and flung the thing into the ditch beside the road.
Chapter 7
On the first day of sophomore year, the three of us met on our usual patch of sidewalk near the parking lot a few minutes before the first bell.
“What’s the plan?” I said. We’d spent the whole summer immersed in our town out in the woods, and it felt off-putting to find myself back in regular society.
“Maybe we should move a slab or two closer to the entrance.” Jay indicated the sidewalk. “Let the new freshmen have this spot. Move ourselves up in the world.”
“I mean about the girls,” I said. “About New Veronia.”
Tosh nodded.
“That’s easy.” Jay scooted a few feet towards the school’s doors, and we followed. “We all need to convince one girl to come back with us to New Veronia.”
“Just like that?” Toshi said.
“Yeah.” Jay nodded once. “Right now, I have three maybes. But I have a feeling, like, they might all want to come back with me.”
“That’s three girls, three of us.” Toshi nodded. “Perfect.”
“No, no, no; they’d all be mine.”
“Do you have condoms?” Toshi said. “Use a condom. Every year, there are nineteen million new STD cases in our country alone.”
Jay said, “You would be lucky to get crabs. But really, come on, we are way ahead of the curve. We’re really doing something about getting laid, unlike all these other idiots in our class.”